ryepdx

Behold, Microsoft hath declared the Courier dead:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/29/microsoft-confirms-kills-courier-in-o...

This means that part of my plan for lifestreaming is no more. Still, I'm pretty sure I can find a way to work around it...

More news to come... sometime.

I just spent three hours banging my head against this problem, so I hope I can save you the trouble if you're where I was.

Well, I've done it. I've broken the whole "responsible" path I've been hellbent on since I was a youth. I'm going on a rock tour across the USA with my band this summer. Sleeping on couches, eating on just $4 a day... oh this is going to be good. :-)

You can keep updated on my adventures as we plan this thing out and finally carry it through to execution at http://shoestringtour.blogspot.com

I was reading a few tech articles today and watching some cool videos when I realized I consume way more tech knowledge than I disseminate. I started thinking about whether it would be possible to disseminate as I learn, whether I could expedite that process.

Recently a client hired me to create a PHP script to populate a MySQL database based on data in a series of XML files. A simple enough task, but the client had recently spent $80 on a product called Magic Parser and so wanted me to use the tool in my code. While I am sure the expenditure would have been worth it had the task been different, I was not at all impressed with Magic Parser's performance with this particular task.

I just read this article on programming and I thought it would be worth sharing. Since I work with strings a lot most of this wasn't really new to me, but I did find it interesting since at Fox we do use Java as one of our introductory languages (the other being Python.)

It's about the need to understand what goes on at the low level of the machine in order to write good high level software. It uses string processing as an example.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.html

I have been trying to make money online for over two years now. I succeeded with FriendBlastr and then proceeded to fail with everything else after that. FriendBlastr, I now see, was an outlier. It worked not because I was good at what I was doing but because the market was so hot. I had a few good ideas that certainly helped, but I do believe my approach was all wrong. Looking back I suspect I could have made more money than I did because of a fundamental flaw in my world view.

I may have spoken too soon in that last post. It turned out there are a few very problematic bugs in the WinForms library that are keeping my application from running properly. While I realize that converting everything over to GTK# would probably solve my problems, the proposition is not one I am at present willing to undertake. Thus it seems I am back to developing solely for Windows on the whole. I do have plans to try porting the application to Java at some point though.

I came across an error while porting to Mono. It read: "Unhandled Exception: System.Resources.MissingManifestResourceException: Could not find any resources appropriate for the specified culture or the neutral culture."

This is the long-winded story of how I solved the problem.

To everyone out there: may the holiday season be a time of happiness for you!